Your Drum Journey

Congratulations on starting your adventure into the world of drums! It will be challenging, confusing and yet satisfying, I assure you. Just so you know, here is the big picture for your drum lessons for the next 3-5 lessons. You will start learning the 3 foundations of playing drums, which are 

1. basic stick control; 
2. hand-foot coordination; and 
3. counting (music pulse).

1) Basic stick-control

What’s the difference between just banging out rhythms on tables and walls (teenage boys do that all the time) and actually playing on the full drum kit? On the kit your playing has to be expressed through drumsticks. If you do not learn how to control the sticks properly, everything you do through your hands on the drums will be flawed. Once you have to play challenging stuff the flaws will become obvious.

So we aim to get some basic stick control first. Correct holding, correct wrist movement and all that. We all start with one hand weaker than the other, and the basic stick drills I teach will help you even it out for both hands and get both hands better. 

It is important to do this from the get-go. I’ve seen way too many people think they can skip this stage at the beginning. By the time they have to work on it properly the bad habits are too strong, it is very painful to fix. I’ve had to undo my bad habits for piano and drums before, and I know: it’s much easier to get things correct the first time!

2) Hand-foot coordination

This is the alphabet of drumming. They are not complex, but most normal people aren’t very well coordinated. The first few lessons help you build new connections within your brain, so that when new patterns and combinations come up your body is already primed to do them. You will also develop independence between your right hand and right foot. This is one of the trademarks of someone who has taken proper drum lessons before. 

3) Counting

This is about taking the pulse, the beat of the music, and knowing where everything you do on the drums fits in. People who are hazy about that are hazy in their drumming. Even worse, they are unable to adapt when the tempo of a song changes.

I’ve been involved with the worship ministry for about 20 years by now, and sat through countless practices and auditions. I was once in the middle of playing a song (to audition someone on another instrument) when halfway through someone sat down behind the drums and tried to play along. He totally messed up because he could only play in one time-signature (don’t worry if you don’t know yet what that is) and the song I was doing was in a different one. 

If he had ever learned how to count, how to discern the pulse of the music, he would have either been able to create on the spot something that can fit, or he would have known what little he knew didn’t fit and not messed up the song for other people. When it was his turn to audition, the other musicians started off at one tempo, and when he started playing the drums he couldn’t latch on to their tempo to support them. He immediately dragged the music down to the tempo he knew. Now imagine him doing that for pretty much every song the band tries to do on a Sunday morning… 

If he had been taught to count he would not have messed things up in the first place. But he never learned how to count. You can never say such people are rusty in their skills, they never had the skills in the first place! 

Counting is vital. The drummer has one job in the band – to count. He or she has to count musically, to count dynamically, but to count. A drummer who cannot count is no drummer at all. And problems in any of the basics cannot be handled with a few tips and pointers during band rehearsals, they have to dealt with one-on-one in proper music lessons. 

Adaptability

In the end, the goal of proper basics is to give you the ability to adapt. Without proper basics, “drummers” can play slow, they can play fast, but cannot manage anything in between. Without proper basics, drummers can play soft, they can play bleeding-from-ears-loud, but cannot manage anything in between. The basics are very important.

Final note: don’t try to find shortcuts around what I teach you. Everything I teach now, and the way I teach now, is to prepare you for everything you’ll need to know for the next 4-6 months. If you come back to this post in a few months time you’ll understand on a deeper level what I am talking about here. 

See you at the next lesson!